Sunday, June 23, 2013

Last week I was sitting in church with Sarah, my almost-8-year-old daughter, and she was reading the psalm with me. Now, last week’s psalm included these words, addressed to God: “You destroy those who speak lies.” Sarah read these words aloud, stopped short, and whispered to me, “That’s not true! God doesn’t destroy anyone!”

I was both surprised and proud. All I could whisper back was, “I think you’re right! God doesn’t destroy anyone, because God loves everyone!”

So now that I’ve openly disagreed with one of the psalms and taught my daughter that she is right to do likewise, I keep coming back to it and wondering about it more deeply. I still don’t believe God destroys those
who speak lies. And shouldn’t that come as a relief? I’m not always entirely
truthful, yet I don’t think God wants to destroy me.

Rather, I think what we have here are raw, human emotions,
and they are abundant in the psalms and throughout the Old Testament. Sometimes
the psalms are embarrassingly emotional, frequently urging God to strike down
enemies or to smite the unjust. And that’s why I can relate to them. Often I
feel the same way the psalmist does, whether I’m feeling angry and vengeful, or
melancholy and longing, or jubilant with joy. These emotions burst out so
honestly in the psalms that that can make us feel uncomfortable, especially
when we find them being projected onto God as well. It isn’t theologically
accurate to do so, but it is emotionally accurate, and that’s why I think the
psalms are so important.

Regardless, though, I’m very pleased to see a brief phrase
in today’s passage from Isaiah that seems to contradict last week’s psalm:

“Do not destroy it, for there is a
blessing in it.”

In the Book of Isaiah, God positively longs for us. God keeps reaching out to humankind, hoping we’ll
notice, hoping we’ll pay attention. We disregard God and go after idols, those
millions of other things in our lives that we think will keep us safe, loved,
and prosperous. We make our sacrifices to the gods of money, security, and
self-absorption. These offerings will
come back to bite us, writes Isaiah. But even so, through it all, God sees the
grapes on our diseased vine and says, “Wait! Stop. Do not destroy it, for there is a blessing in it.”

Whenever we approach the Bible, we can expect to feel
uncomfortable, and I think that’s why so few Americans read it. Its texts are not
supposed to go easy on us. They were written long ago and far away, and there
are aspects of them that will forever feel long ago and far away to us. But
they are also steeped in meaning that is as relevant today as ever before.
Different parts of the Bible speak to different people in different ways at
different times. When a text feels problematic to us or just plain wrong, the
answer is not to write it off, but to be patient with it, the same way God is
patient with us. God does not destroy us, but keeps searching for the blessing
in us. Likewise, we must be patient with God as God is revealed to us in
scripture, in the sacraments, and through the other people in our lives. We
need to keep looking for the blessing.

You may notice that our Gospel story for today contains some
of the same elements as the Isaiah passage: tombs, and pigs … and even some nudity
thrown in. Imagine it in the ears of a first-century Jewish audience: the story
reeks with uncleanness. The Greeks didn’t mind nudity as much; they famously performed
athletic events naked. But Jews were very modest. According to the Torah, contact
with the dead would render one ritually unclean, and pigs were unclean as well:
only Gentiles would herd them. And, of course, the evil spirits in the man are the
epitome of “unclean.” So Jesus has gone from the comfort and safety of home
into a Gentile country of over-the-top uncleanness.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I hear this story of
the Gerasene demoniac, I can’t help but think of J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous
character from Lord of the Rings,
Gollum. I can see him skulking among the tombs, pouncing on unsuspecting
passers-by or going down to the beach to catch fish with his bare hands. When
he meets Jesus, I imagine him hissing, “What has you to do with ussssss,
Jesussssss? We are not just one, but Legion! Don’t send ussss back into the
abyssss! Let preciousssss go into the pigsies, yesss, yesssssss!”

All kidding aside, I don’t think it’s a bad comparison.
Gollum, many of us know, was once something like a regular person, but after
being owned and tortured for hundreds of years by his idol, the evil ring of
power, he gradually becomes something twisted, broken, and relentlessly self-absorbed.
The man Jesus meets in the Gentile country of the Gerasenes is a victim, and we
have no idea how he got that way. Demon possession, after all, is another thing
in the Bible that we think of as long ago and far away, if it ever existed at
all. Perhaps it’s a disease masquerading as a malevolent force. But in this
story it is very real and very threatening, whatever it is. A legion of demons
is consuming this man, much the way Gollum was consumed by the ring. Perhaps it
is even his own fault.

Yet Jesus has compassion, and so he begins to hunt for the
man beneath the demons. “What is your name?” This is what Jesus asks a person
who is lost in uncleanness. Who are you? What is your identity? Can you
remember? Gollum was once called Sméagol. When we give something scary a name,
we do two things: we gain some amount of power over it, and we remind it of
what it used to be. But to whom does Jesus ask the question? The demons
respond, but can the question be for them? Does Jesus’ compassion extend not
only to the man but even to the demons that inhabit him? Can there be hope even
for them?

When the demons come face to face with Jesus, they know the
jig is up. They are overpowered merely by being in Jesus’ presence, and they
must submit to his authority. We people can fool ourselves about Jesus’
authority; other created beings cannot. And so Jesus bores into the man’s soul
and draws out the demons from deep within. Everyone else has thrown this man
away as a threat and a lost cause. But Jesus says otherwise. “Do not destroy it, for there is a blessing
in it!”

So intent is Jesus on restoring this man to health that he
completely disregards the property rights of the pig herders. And after all,
what’s a herd of unclean swine compared with even one human being’s restoration
to wholeness? But the pig herders run and tell the neighbors, and soon there’s
a crowd coming out to see what has happened to this man. He was naked, and now
he is clothed. (I always wonder where his clothes came from.) He was insane,
and now he is in his right mind. He belongs to himself again, so now, he can
give himself to Jesus.

This scares the people so much that they beg Jesus to leave.
I wonder what they’re so afraid of? Losing more pigs to exorcism? Or is it that
they will have to deal with the startling, disturbing reality that in Jesus’
presence, nobody—nobody is a lost
cause? Who knows what other former scum they’ll have to welcome back with Jesus
around? Fear of change can lead us to want to drive goodness away.

The healed man wants to follow Jesus away from this place,
but, importantly, Jesus says no. Jesus needs this man to spread the good news
of his transformation to the surrounding Gentile areas. Besides, restoring the
man to his own community was exactly what Jesus set out to do in the first
place.

So the man goes home and follows Jesus’ orders … well, sort
of. I notice a little intriguing detail in the text. Jesus instructs him,
“Return to your home, and declare how much God
has done for you.” So what does he do? He declares how much Jesus has done for him. The man knows
that in meeting Jesus, he has somehow, inexplicably, come face to face with
God. He doesn’t see any difference between them.

So let’s step back for a minute. When you heard the gospel
story read this morning, did it scare you a little? Did you wonder what to do
with these demons—like, oh, great, one of these
readings? I mean, maybe you believe in demons, and maybe you don’t. Or maybe
different people mean different things by the term. I have encountered
situations in my life that I can only describe as demonic—there’s no more
appropriate label. But I have also seen miraculous healing, with no better
label than that. Have you?

Can you catch a glimpse of the other layer of reality that
the Bible can only hint at with its bizarre yet engaging stories? And when you
do encounter a demon or a healing, what will you do with it? What mysterious goodness
comes to upset your imperfect but orderly world, the world you can wrap your
mind around? And when it comes, will you send goodness away? Or will you find
the blessing in it? After all, that divine healing power is available to
absolutely everyone. Amen.